Afflicted with hyper-magnetization, Jerry (Jack Black) inadvertently erases the inventory of VHS at his best friend Mike’s (Mos Def) video store. With a scheme to recreate the hits themselves with a two-bit videocam, the pair become unlikely neighborhood stars with their hand-crafted appropriations of America’s pop catalog. Robocop, The Lion King, and Driving Miss Daisy are but a handful that receive hat-tipped tributes in Michel Gondry’sBe Kind Rewind.

By tapping into a wealth of moviegoers who don’t know The Science of Sleep from Weird Science, this appears to be Gondry’s most accessible and box-office viable offering to date. Past efforts may have been pooh-poohed as too twee or whimsical, but Black and Mos as tin-foiled Ghostbusters suggest too much pure-popcorn fun to deny.